


All Along I Believed I Would Find You

by nonisland



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Community: kinkme_merlin, M/M, Modern Era, Post-Canon, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2012-09-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At first it was everyone. Life after life the people who’d been important to them came back, over and over, moving like bits of brilliant glass in a kaleidoscope.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Along I Believed I Would Find You

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the **kinkme_merlin** prompt “[Arthur/Merlin A reincarnation fic, only this time, there's no one else but them.](http://kinkme-merlin.livejournal.com/32553.html?thread=33766185#t33766185)” Title from Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years”.
> 
> I want to be clear that the major character death warning, here, is not just a technicality relating to reincarnation; this fic is _about_ the absence of loved ones, and if that isn’t something you feel up to reading today (or ever), please do be aware.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Should you find something, whilst reading one of my stories, that offends you/is incorrect/could offend others/is in any way problematic, please please _please_ do not hesitate to tell me. I will never spew hate at you, I will never attack you, and I will _always_ thank you for taking the time to let me know.

Arthur is nearly thirty when he finally accepts that Morgana is gone.

It takes Merlin another four years—four years of trying every day to contact her with magic gone static-crackly, fractured prismlike by every wireless hotspot and satellite dish and base station it passes, bounced ruthlessly off pavements and plastics.

“Maybe she was born somewhere else this time,” he says one day, lashes spiked with sweat and bruised circles under his eyes. It’s exhausting, so much more so now than it was centuries ago. “Not anywhere in the British Isles.”

Arthur looks at him and doesn’t say anything. He’s no better at comfort than he ever was; it’s how quiet he is, how warm the hand he rests on Merlin’s shoulder feels, that strikes ruthlessly through to Merlin’s core and says, _no_.

They get desperately drunk that night, and tumble into bed all frantic hands and breaking hearts, greedy and rough and desperate with profound loneliness.

* * *

At first it was everyone. Life after life the people who’d been important to them came back, over and over, moving like bits of brilliant glass in a kaleidoscope.

Gwen was a duke’s daughter, once, courted by princes and choosing none of them. She was a sculptor and a surgeon and an inventor struggling with numbers that she had no way yet to express. Ygraine lived, more often than not; Uther without the madness of grief and power proved to be a kinder man. Lancelot was a priest sometimes, a soldier other times, still others a judge—drawn, always, to virtue and glory and service. Morgause was a kingmaker, a rebel and a reformer. They found Freya in city convents and in wind-blasted huts on remote mountains. Morgana was a poet, an actress, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and a suffragette chaining herself to a railing; she and Gwen joined the army, once, disguised with an easy flicker of glamour and hungering for justice, in love with freedom and life and each other.

* * *

They go to a party one of Arthur’s employers is hosting, and a few hours in Arthur goes sheet-white, staring as if he’s just seen—

Merlin whirls around, but there’s nobody there—just a pretty blonde in a champagne-colored dress, frowning at the music. Then she turns away again and in the curve of her jaw and the tumble of curls down from the top of her head he could swear he saw Vivian.

“Christ,” he says under his breath, and takes Arthur’s arm. “Let’s go home.”

Arthur doesn’t mention it again until they’re in bed, wrapped in blankets and wrapped again in darkness. “I thought she was—”

“Vivian,” Merlin says. If he closes his eyes he can still remember the last time—no, not the last time he saw her, he doesn’t want to remember that, but the last time he’d known her—she’d been the acknowledged beauty of the season, haughty as she’d been when he met her for the very first time until she wasn’t anymore; Percival had taken one look at her and fallen, hopelessly, and somehow they’d ended up hopelessly compromised at someone’s house party and Merlin had thought it was all incredibly funny at the time, a perfect comeuppance and a happy ending all in one.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing her,” Arthur says. (Even her.)

Shadows from the streetlight outside dance on the ceiling.

“No,” Merlin says. “I wouldn’t mind either.”

* * *

During the Renaissance Nimueh took Morgana and Merlin under her wing. She taught them uses of their magic they’d never thought of (hadn’t yet remembered), and Merlin hated the twists of fate that had made them enemies first and strangers for a long time after; they both fell a little in love with her, and with each other, and after that lessons ended sometimes not in the workroom but in the bedroom.

Arthur and Morgana killed each other, their second life. And that was it, somehow; they’d started clean after that, usually with respect and sometimes with real affection.

* * *

If Arthur were asked when he misses Gwen most, Merlin is fairly sure he’d say _whenever the car won’t start_ and certain he’d be lying. She’d picked up cars quickly, certainly, and she’d probably be better with them still than either Arthur (who has no patience) or Merlin (who feels technology shift strangely on him, who has even worse luck with it than Morgana did).

Merlin misses her always, but especially:

in springtime when flowers push their way out of the dirt; whenever he sees a bright umbrella through the rain; with every jeweler’s store that puts as much effort into the metal as the gem; when he tastes honey; as the world moves closer and closer to being kind to women who look like her and love like her.

Especially always.

She and Lancelot were killed during a zeppelin attack on London while he was on leave. The war that didn’t end all wars took them all, Arthur in the trenches and Merlin of the flu and Morgana—they hadn’t asked Morgana, after. It’s been nearly a hundred years.

It’s been very little time at all, for as long as he’d known them.

(If Merlin were asked about Lancelot, he would say something light, but he would mean the same thing. Always; everything.)

* * *

It had begun with a wish to make things right, on Merlin’s part—to take all his power and all his ability and use them to heal and build instead of harm and destroy.

It had been a wish to protect his kingdom, on Arthur’s part, which somehow got caught up in legend as a promise he would return in England’s darkest hour.

It had become its own thing, somehow, like a creature infinitely greater than any dragon which coiled them carefully through the centuries, bearing them on its back, until it began to flicker and fade and weaken as this thing called “progress” wove thorny tendrils through the world, choking out magic like weeds in a field.

* * *

“What happens to us?” Arthur asks.

Merlin shakes his head.

“Merlin.”

“I don’t know, all right? Maybe nothing. Maybe we’ll come back again. Maybe we’ll end up in some afterlife, Heaven or—or Avalon.”

It’s far too sunny for this conversation. They’re in a field that could have been a graveyard, if anyone had been buried in it; they know where Morgana’s last grave is and Merlin _thinks_ he can remember her surname from the life before that, but everything slips away in patches and neither of them are sure whether if they want guidance from her they should find her last body or her first. So it’s a field, instead, empty and bright with a brook laughing in the distance, the kind of place Morgana had loved whenever she was happy.

“I don’t think,” Arthur starts, and stops.

Merlin forces a smile. “Yeah, and?”

Arthur rips up some grass and throws it at him, absurd and childish, and it’s comforting like a hot drink after a walk through the snow, spreading still and warm somewhere hollow inside Merlin. “I don’t think I’d like another time with just us.”

Merlin looks at his hands, at fingers that used to be able to weave lightning like thread, stop time, strike at death itself. He can still make little pictures in sparks, if he wants to, if he has a fire to pull them from. “I don’t think there’s going to be another time.”

Arthur’s phone rings—someone from the office, since Arthur answers it; something important, from the half of the conversation Merlin can hear.

The sky above is bluer than fire or water, and Merlin wonders.

Avalon, he hopes—and hopes it will be a long time yet before they find out. Some land beyond the world where everyone they’ve loved is there to be found again.


End file.
